When The Trees All Burned (The Path That Takes Us Home)

EVERY APOCALYPSE NEEDS A PROPHET. EVERY PROPHET NEEDS BELIEVERS.
The truth was always there. The choice was always yours.

Forty years ago, on the night his mother died, Rajiv Montgomery Noah received a vision of fire that would consume the world. While others dismissed the growing signs of climate collapse, he devoted his life to an improbable task: building a sanctuary in the wilderness of northern Ontario—a dome erected over an abandoned mine, designed to shelter two hundred souls within the ancient forest.

Now, as the world teeters on the edge of catastrophe, Rajiv's dome stands as both monument and shelter—a testament to hope, hubris, and the weight of choosing who survives. But neither the dome's reinforced walls nor Rajiv's careful calculations can prepare its inhabitants for the moral complexity of being the chosen few, or shield them from the haunting question: what makes survival worthwhile when everything familiar has burned away?

When The Trees All Burned, the first novel in The Path That Takes Us Home series, is a meditation on grief, purpose, and human resilience in the face of environmental collapse. In the tradition of Station Eleven and The Road, it asks not just how we might survive a dying world, but who we become in the surviving.

Alanna was born in the wrong decade and dreams of abandoning everything to live in a van and travel across Canada. She'll call it "a book tour," but it's really an excuse to unleash her inner hippie. A collector of typewriters and John Travolta VHS movies, she believes life is too short to not indulge in the things that bring you joy and in keeping with that philosophy, she left a stuffy office job of 18 years to launch a full-time indie press out of a chicken coop on her childhood property. An author of literary and speculative fiction, Alanna likes to play in dark spaces, but always leaves room for redemption. Her latest novel is about burning down the world in order to set things right. Settled in West Grey as a four-year-old, it has always been her home and source of inspiration and she's working hard to build bridges between the various arts communities. With no immediate plans to abandon this, she will certainly leave it all behind the moment her husband gets on board with the van-life idea.